Chapter 5: Ironmoor's Property

Sera's Pov

Morning came in pale and quiet. I lay still for a moment, listening. No pack horn. No raised voices. Just the sound of someone moving around downstairs.

I got up. My arm ached when I moved it wrong, but it held. I changed the bandage myself, careful with the wrapping, the way I'd learned years ago. Then I got dressed and stood in front of the door for a second longer than I needed to.

Don't make it mean something.

I opened the door and went downstairs.

The main hall was bigger than I'd expected, dark wood and high windows, morning light cutting across the floor. A few wolves moved through it, talking low. Nobody stopped what they were doing when I came down. But I felt it, the room shifting slightly, eyes moving toward me and then away, like they'd been told not to stare and were trying hard to comply.

I kept walking down a corridor, past a kitchen that smelled like something baking, past a room with long tables that looked like it was used for meetings. I wasn't looking for anything in particular. I just wanted to know the shape of the place. Three years in Ironmoor had taught me that. Know your exits. Know your spaces. Know where the walls were before you needed them.

I turned a corner into a narrower hallway and a wolf was standing there. Young, maybe my age, broad through the shoulders in the way most of them seemed to be. He didn't move when I came around the corner. He just stood there, blocking most of the hallway, looking at me like he'd been waiting.

"You're the one from Ironmoor," he said.

"I'm aware."

"Caden Holt's leftovers." He said it like he'd practiced it. "Walking around like you belong somewhere."

"Move," I said.

"This isn't your pack. You don't get to give orders here. You're Ironmoor's property, wandering around like…"

"She belongs to herself."

The voice came from behind me, flat and final, and the temperature in the hallway changed instantly. The young wolf's face went through several things fast, surprise, then something close to fear, then a scramble to recover that didn't quite land.

"Alpha, I didn't…"

"Move," Riven said again. Same word I'd used. Same flatness.

The wolf moved, fast, sideways, pressed against the wall like he was trying to take up less space than he occupied. He didn't look at me again. He left, footsteps quick down the hall.

I turned. Riven was a few feet back, hands loose at his sides, like he'd just been walking through and happened to arrive at the right moment. I didn't believe that.

"You didn't have to do that," I said.

"I know."

"I could have handled him."

"I know that too." He fell into step beside me, not making anything of it. "Doesn't mean I was going to stand there and watch."

I glanced at him. He wasn't looking at me. He was looking ahead, the same unhurried calm he carried everywhere.

"He's going to tell people what happened," I said.

"Good."

"Good?"

"Now they know," he said. "Saves me explaining it to the next one."

We walked in silence for a while. My stomach reminded me, suddenly, that I hadn't eaten since the morning before. Riven tipped his head toward the kitchen.

"Mara will have something," he said. "She always does."

"I'm not hungry."

"You're swaying again."

"I'm not."

I went in anyway, because it was easier than arguing, and because some stubborn part of me was, in fact, hungry. Mara was there, moving around with the same unhurried competence she'd had in my room the day before. She glanced up and didn't look surprised at all.

"Sit," she said. Not a request.

I sat. Riven didn't. He said something quiet to Mara that I didn't catch, and then he was gone.

The rest of the day passed in pieces. I explored the lodge, carefully, staying out of the way. Nobody else stopped me in a hallway. Word travels fast in a pack, I suppose. By the time the light went gold and long through the windows, I'd mapped most of the ground floor without meaning to. Three exits. Two stairwells. A door near the kitchen leading out to some kind of yard.

I went back to my room before it got dark. I sat on the edge of the bed and didn't do anything for a long time.

That was when it happened.

Not all at once. It came in slowly, the way cold comes into a room when a door's been left open somewhere you can't see. I thought about the great hall. The two females by the pillar. Caden's face when he looked at her, that one unguarded second he'd never once given me in three years.

She is my fated mate.

I thought about the howl on the road. That sound, pulled from somewhere deep, a man hurting in a way I'd never heard before. And some small, traitorous part of me had wanted to turn around. I wanted to go back and ask if he was alright, because that was what I did, that was what I was fo

No.

Three years of cooking his meals and running his house and sitting at his left at every dinner, telling myself it added up to something. He had never once said it out loud. I had filled the silence myself, with hope, because it was easier than asking and hearing the answer.

My eyes burned. I let them. There was no one here to see it. Just me, a room that smelled like pine, and the last of the gold light fading.

I cried for exactly as long as it took, and then I stopped. I wiped my face and breathed, slow, then slower. I folded it down small, somewhere I could find it later. Not tonight.

I lay back and looked at the ceiling until I fell asleep.